For the Filipino farm workers who launched the stay-at-home in the Zaninovich camp this rich union tradition was the story of their own lives. They had lived it, they had authored it, they were the men who had sometimes lost and often won. They were mostly “Manong,” the first generation of Filipinos who had come to California as young men between 1923 and 1934. The union victories in the thirties were among the great adventures of their youth. Those exploits, well told and therefore well remembered, were part of the sweetness of their bittersweet lives. The internal solidarity and unity in action that had made these triumphs possible were not apart from a daily life that combined hard work and great suffering with an almost unfathomable closeness and mutual affection. The closeness had been forced upon them. The 20,000 souls who had worked together in the California fields since the mid-1920s lived thoroughly segregated lives: restricted to a small variety of jobs; cramped together in labor camps, or in the cheap hotels and rundown apartments of various “little Manilas”; cut off from family life by the fact that few women emigrated from the Philippines and that until 1948 it had been illegal in California for whites or Mexicans to marry Filipinos.* Stranded in small islands of male friends and fellow workers, they learned to take care of each other. They rented rooms together where they shared beds, food, and money. They pooled resources and bought jointly owned cars or an expensive suit of clothes which they would take turns wearing as they posed for pictures to be sent home or when they went out for a night on the town. Some were able to extend their internal solidarity out into the world. The Manong produced a high percentage of radical internationalists, labor union activists, socialists, and Communists. Many others remained quite insular, true only to their shared bachelor society, passing their time working, playing cards, and raising and fighting their beloved roosters. Some, only a few, lived off various scams and con games, often taking advantage of the naiveté of their more trusting brothers. But most of the Manong lived deeply interrelated lives, their fates woven closer and closer together as the years went by, until the 1965 grape strike gave them one last chance to walk together onto the public stage and one last story to tell.
By the time of the strike, however, the Manong did have some company. After World War II, many Filipino veterans became citizens, traveled to Hawaii and the Philippines, got married, had children, and then returned to the U.S. and farm work. When their sons grew old enough, some followed their fathers to California, and joined them in the fields. By 1965, these men were in their early twenties, ready to become the “Huks” of the strike (a reference to the Hukbalahap guerrillas who had fought the Japanese occupation in World War II)—so called for their militancy on the picket lines and their guerrilla actions in the fields.15
Rudy Reyes, who would become a soldier of the early UFW, was part of this minority within a minority, but his story is different from those of his fellow Delano Huks. His dad, an early Manong, joined the Coast Guard well before World War II, met his Filipina wife in Hawaii, and after the war moved his family to Seattle, where he got a job as a draftsman. Reyes, born in 1941, grew up in a prosperous working-class family and got good grades in high school, but instead of going to college he went to the fields. “I wanted to learn, yes, I wanted to learn . . . but not in college. I wanted to learn to be a hobo. I was a reader; I had read Hemingway and Kerouac, and I wanted to hit the road. It wasn’t hard to find hobo life. I went down to the Seattle waterfront and just signed up.”16
Rudy traveled with Native Americans, whites, and blacks on the hobo circuit. They would work for a little while at a small ranch, then move on when they had enough money in their pockets. They worked only when they had to. Otherwise it was stealing fruit and vegetables from the fields, making big pots of soup, hanging out, and telling stories. There was quite a lot of drinking, but not everyone was a drunk. While working in the apples in Yakima, Washington, he linked up with a black man named Billy, who was a little bit older and taught him how to ride the trains. They ran into some of the same people everywhere, and Rudy became a somebody in his own chosen world. “There weren’t many fights,” said Reyes. “Hobos are actually a pretty peaceful bunch.”
But Billy was a tough, strong man, and people gave him a wide berth. One time we were together in a railroad yard in Seattle, and five or six drunk white tramps stumbled upon us. They either didn’t know Billy or they were too drunk to realize who he was. They said they were going to kick the shit out of us. Billy told me to give him my knife and leave. I gave him the knife; he knew how to use it better than I, but I didn’t leave. I picked up a rock instead and hurled it at the drunks. It wasn’t much of a fight; the men were too juiced up to be dangerous and soon ran off. But I knocked one down and started to kick him as he lay on the ground. Billy grabbed me. “No, no, Rudy. Don’t you dare kick a man when he’s down. We done defended ourselves. That’s all that matters. Let’s get out of here.” I never forgot those words. They have always been my guide when it comes to violence.
Reyes kept on reading: cowboy stories, mysteries, nonfiction. At one hobo camp, he found a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. For three days running the book was hardly out of his hands. He was reading about white tramps in a camp dominated by white tramps, old Okies. As he read about the Joads, he just looked up from the book and there they were. The only things missing were the cars and the strikes. Cars didn’t interest him. But strikes? Hemingway and Kerouac hadn’t said anything about strikes. And the people Rudy ran with thought of themselves as hobos, not farm workers, although farm work is what they did. They never got involved in a labor dispute. If they didn’t like something about a job, they just left it. Sometimes everyone went at once, knowing they had left the farmer with a big problem, but they didn’t call it a strike.
Reyes had heard about Delano up in Washington; people said you could make good money in the grapes. He was in Los Angeles in 1965, in Watts, when he decided to head north. The Watts Riots had broken out, and “it was a lot of fun for a while . . . like a big party. Then the cops came and started shooting into the crowd . . . [and] it turned ugly.” He took a freight train out of LA and wound up in Delano’s Chinatown. “I walked into the Manila Café. I didn’t have to be too smart to figure out that was a good place to start.” The next day he was in a Filipino labor camp owned by Vincent Zaninovich, Marco’s brother. An AWOC enthusiast, Julian Balidoy, younger than the Manong, who were the majority in the camp, but older than Reyes, told him that a strike was coming soon. Rudy wanted to start right then; he was twenty-four years old.
In September 1965 there was nothing inevitable about Mexican solidarity with the Filipinos. Such solidarity was not unheard of in California’s agricultural history, but it was the exception. More Filipino strikes had been broken by strike-breaking Mexicans (and vice versa) than had been helped by acts of interethnic solidarity. And this time, the Filipinos were particularly vulnerable. They were mostly an aging, shrinking part of the workforce, and if the local Mexican majority decided to scab, not only was the Filipinos’ strike doomed, but the Filipinos’ very presence in the vineyards might be jeopardized.
The National Farm Workers Association’s decision to join the strike, unlike the act of defiance that began it, was made by the association’s leadership rather than by the rank and file. The workers were confused and divided. What should they do? Some were already crossing the picket lines; most continued to pick grapes on the ranches where there were no strikes. A few of the Mexicans saw the same opportunity that the Filipinos had seen, but no Mexican work stoppage, organized from below, added its weight to the Filipino action. Instead, people came to the NFWA office to see what the association was going to do now that the struggle had arrived at its own doorstep.
Formally joining this strike would require a commitment different from anything the association had ever attempted. Potentially some 5,000 workers might be involved, and the fight would engage a group of powerful and hostile bosses directly. The NFWA leaders did not want to be dragged into such a battle against their will if, in their best judgment, they were sure to lose. The leaders had to make that judgment. They could not avoid making it, as there were no local Mexican strikes in progress, no farm worker militants pulling them along and making the decision for them. No delegation of striking Filipinos came to Cesar Chavez and asked for his support. Rather, Mexican workers came and asked him what he was going to do. It was mostly the more militant ones who wanted to know, but they would not act on their own.
Manuel and Esther Uranday,